Like, uh, and um – filler words that, regardless of whether or not what you're saying is right, tell everyone around you that you already think you're wrong.

Confidence is portrayed in so many ways. Speaking with conviction is one of the best ways to – even if you have no clue what you're saying – convince those around you that you're an expert.

As an observer, I can be convinced that anyone is an expert on anything if they present themselves with authority and conviction.

Think of trying to get into one of the hottest clubs. Knowing the door is always a challenge, do you awkwardly stare at the bouncer, fumble your ID, and shrink into yourself, or do you flip your hair, throw the bouncer off with your charm, and get the velvet ropes lifted before he even glances at your ID? I would argue (and hope) you are doing the latter.

In my mind, using excessive filler words is equivalent to fumbling at the door: you know you are more than qualified, so why not act like it?

Simple. People are afraid of making mistakes.

The beauty of a mistake has been lost. In a time of hyperconnectivity, a mistake no longer feels like an isolated incident — it feels like a cosmic fuck-up broadcast to everyone watching.

Instead of our mistakes being learning opportunities for ourselves, we have somehow come to think that making a mistake is a spectacle for everyone else — not a chance for people to watch someone fumble and proceed, but a chance to judge you for being wrong at all.

The root of this confidence deficit can be broken into two categories: how much we perceive people care about us, and our complete disregard for the importance of process.

Here's the truth: no one cares about you as much as you think.

The seat of sanctimony is the easiest place anyone can occupy. They put nothing on the line and exact endless amounts of criticism. But judgment comes from envy — so if someone is going to judge you for taking a risk and fumbling, they are communicating one thing: their deep desire to have had the nerve to try in the first place. Everyone gets a cheap thrill from sanctimony. Fine. But put yourself in the seat of the judged and see just how hard it truly is, and how little there really is to judge.

The fear of that judgment is exactly what produces the filler word. It's not just that you don't know the answer — it's that you've already decided the audience is hostile. So before a single thought is fully formed, you're hedging, stalling, apologizing in advance. "Like, um, this is probably totally wrong but…" The velvet rope never lifts because you fumbled your own ID.

Where has it gone, why have we lost it, and how do we work it back into our end results?

AI has completely distorted our perception of what thinking through a problem actually feels like. Consider the student who uses it to skip the messy drafting stage — who goes straight from prompt to polished paragraph without ever sitting with the confusion in between. They've produced something, sure. But when asked to speak about it, to defend it, to extend the idea somewhere new, they have nothing. No reps. No memory of how they got there. And so it's straight to the filler word — the verbal placeholder for a process that was never allowed to happen.

This plays out in classrooms constantly. Students brag about using AI to summarize readings, write responses, and build presentations. And in doing so, they strip themselves of the ability to think. Regardless of how inconsequential an assignment may feel, a significant part of what school offers is the process itself — what works and what doesn't, how to recognize a familiar problem, how to apply what you've figured out before to what's in front of you now. School is a low-stakes environment to experiment with your own thinking, fail, and be handed another chance the next morning. Skipping straight from start to finish makes the process look like an inefficient middleman. But the middleman is the whole point.

Filler words, then, are the verbal confession that we don't know how to sit with a messy process long enough to reach an articulate end result.

Do the opposite of everyone else. When the room is full of people cutting out the process, make the process a deliberate and visible part of your end result. Let yourself not know yet. Let the gears turn in front of people. The discomfort of that is exactly what builds the confidence that makes the velvet rope go up — not charm alone, but the earned authority of someone who has actually worked through something.

Confidence is not innate; it is learned. And it is learned through failure, repetition, and the hard-won feeling of having solved something on your own. AI can hand you an answer. It cannot hand you the moment your brain finally clicks into place — and that moment is what you're actually after. That's what makes you speakable. Credible. Unafraid.

So cut "like," "um," and "uh" from your vocabulary — not by policing yourself word by word, but by trusting the process enough that you stop needing to stall. Speak with precision, with gravitas, and with the expertise that only comes from having actually done the work.

Shortcuts always lead to the longest path.

Kisses.

Nicky Reich